Proposing Removal of the Offline Browser Startpage

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 08:05:08AM +0100, Matthew East wrote:

> It seems to me that the current offline startpage serves no useful
> purpose. Essentially if users use firefox and are not connected to the
> internet, ubufox shows them the offline startpage which is found at
> file:///usr/share/ubuntu-artwork/home/index.html. That file has been
> shipped in the ubuntu-docs package since Dapper. However, it seems to
> me to be the wrong approach - when a user is not connected to the
> internet and opens their browser, they shouldn't be shown a page that
> looks like a web page, because it might confuse them into thinking
> they are connected. What I believe they should see is information that
> they are not connected to the internet. And that's what a browser will
> always do if it tries to connect to a remote webpage and there is no
> working internet connection.

> So what it seems to me we should do is to configure browsers to point
> at http://start.ubuntu.com/[Ubuntu version here]. If the user isn't
> connected, they will see information which tells them that, which is
> entirely appropriate in my opinion. If the "no internet connection"
> page of any particular browser is too ugly or not user friendly, we
> should file bugs about improving it.

> What do people think?

Is there any risk that this will cause a degraded experience for users who
have a half-up network connection (unusually high latency causing delayed
loading of the initial window, or wireless provider proxy pages causing
confusing behavior on the default page)?  It's likely that the behavior will
be the same with or without the ubufox mediation because these cases already
get treated as "network up", but I think this question bears asking.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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